Forum Discussion
Disable refresh when working in PowerQuery
One option would be to disable background data refresh to prevent changes from triggering an automatic refresh while you make changes.
Follow this: Disable Power Query background refresh
Steps:
In Power BI Desktop, you disable automatic background refresh by selecting File > Options and settings > Options, Current File > Data Load page > Background Data. While editing: Uncheck 'Allow data preview to download in the background'. When done, return and Check this option to enable background refresh for the current file.
this is one of the reasons i've recently started doing my powerquery workup in excel and for each large or slow data source i create a dummy table locally with a cut and paste copy of the data (my data sets are not enormous - of the 100s of thousands of rows) that i reference during development.
once i've taken things far enough to go back to live data i just cut and paste the contents of the original query advanced editor script into the query for the dummy data, rename it and continue. often at this point i migrate the queries to powerbi.
i would love to hear if this is not the way but so far i find it works reliably.
This sounds like a good way to introduce transcription errors. Copying and pasting large swathes of data can get you in trouble if you don't notice any accidental overwrites etc.